On August 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law. Whatever you might think about, this legislation is certainly the biggest step forward in climate action in our lifetimes.
But that’s not the only thing we have to talk about in the Nori Carbon Removal Meme Lab this week!
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Ross sits down with fellow memeologists, Siobhan Montoya Lavender and Asa Kamer, to revel in having our Lion King Meme featured on Zeke Hausfather’s Twitter response to a New York Times opinion piece against carbon capture and storage or CCS.
Ross, Siobhan, and Asa also discuss why academics in the carbon removal space have a growing bias toward high durability and high permanence, yet capital is flowing into natural climate solutions.
Listen in to understand the challenges around ton-year carbon accounting and learn about public reaction to the Inflation Reduction Act and how it finances clean energy.
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
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Resources
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
‘Every Dollar Spent on This Climate Technology Is a Waste’ in The New York Times
Zeke Hausfather’s Twitter Thread
Jason Hochman on Reversing Climate Change S3EP20
John Daly Smoking Next to Tiger Woods Meme Template
Dr. Julio Friedmann on Reversing Climate Change EP016
Ton-Year Accounting on Carbon Removal Newsroom
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Asa Kamer: Do you remember these memes? This might be a fun one to do for carbon removal — the guy in the hospital bed. It’s a stock photo, waking up from a coma, and it’s like, “Sir, you’ve been in a coma since 2022.” And it’s like, “Oh wow, the carbon removal industry should have taken over the whole planet by now.”
Ross Kenyon: Let’s do it. I haven’t seen it before, but I like it. We could go the other way, where the person is like, “We solved climate change with just decarbonization, right?” And then we could make it sound like a prominent carbon removal person. But that’s a good one. That’s all — I’m ready to ship. [unclear] Write it down, remember it, put it in motion, do something with this. Don’t forget.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I thought we got — one of our memes was used in one of Zeke Hausfather’s threads on the New York Times article. Did you guys see that today?
Ross Kenyon: No. Of course, I talked to him a little bit. But can he come on Newsroom? He would be great.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Also, I feel like he has a good sense of humor, and he’s also, you know, obviously quite the expert in the field. I always really appreciate his takes. And so, the second after this — I found it the second I saw the New York Times, because I was just on my iPad in the morning drinking tea with the Times. And I saw this story, and I mean, it was like, okay, I need the Twitter hot takes on this from [unclear], and sure enough, here comes a Twitter hot take. And yeah, you referenced one of our memes. It’s just always a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Asa Kamer: Yes. Yeah, it’s — well, it’s yours. I think you came in with this one, didn’t you? I feel like [unclear]. But yeah, it’s the Lion King, enhanced oil recovery: “You must never go there.”
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, well, it’s because it’s topical, you know? This whole discussion around enhanced oil recovery and CCS, or CCUS as it were — now that’s getting, like, New York Times attention. And I feel like that’s, on the one hand, great; on the other hand, it’s maybe furthering the misconceptions about the difference between CDR and CCS, or the role of CCS. And I just appreciate this kind of nuanced take that Zeke put forth, to kind of balance out the piece, I thought. And I mean, the piece had some really good and legitimate points, but then I thought there were some things that needed further clarification, and I think he did a good job.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Yeah, I haven’t even seen his take on this yet, but I certainly will absorb it. In a previous life I was passing through Washington, D.C. quite a lot. A lot of my friends who worked at think tanks — the goal was always to have policy recommendations written so that when lawmakers, when something landed on their desk as a bill, they would need to get caught up, and you would have the source document that they would reference to learn from. That’s basically us, but for memes now. So we need Zeke — we’re making the memes. I know you make memes too. We’re going to make them ahead of time for you to use in your threads.
Asa Kamer: There you go, that’s when it’s appropriate to do so. That’s a pretty good goal, I think. I like it. Yeah, that’s really smart. And there’s, like, a second wave [unclear] when it’s relevant. Like, we just kind of put it out there and it could just sit on our page, and when someone wants it —
Ross Kenyon: Didn’t somebody on the show recently say memes are the new white papers?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Who said that? I think it was you. I think I read [unclear]. So I think you referenced somebody saying — I don’t remember. You, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Oh, Jason — Jason Hochman said that.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Okay, so thank you for validating my entire existence. I’m going to thank you for that reason. [unclear] That’s a nice catch. He didn’t — he didn’t tell you sooner? I didn’t — I wouldn’t have noticed it, [unclear]. But I’m glad that we got that. What did you — what is this from? There’s a crazy golfer and, like, a normie golfer.
Asa Kamer: So the guy on the right is John Daly, who kind of got famous in the ’90s, and he had, like, a big belly. He would smoke cigarettes and was kind of partying off the course, and was just sort of a wild man. He kind of had a blue-collar appeal, and golf was a little more stale and kind of stuffy, like as you can see from the photo. And then that’s Tiger Woods, who is, like, the best ever, basically, but just maybe a little more traditional and, like, stuffy. So it’s sort of an attitude — the difference in attitude, I guess — and maybe John Daly represents being a little more legit and authentic, or something like that. I don’t know, but it cracks me up. It’s a great image, and I’ve been seeing it float around.
Ross Kenyon: I was going to say, is it a similar era and style to John McEnroe in tennis?
Asa Kamer: Yeah, kind of. Okay, kind of. And he was the first guy who would, like, hit the ball really far, which then Tiger Woods also did, but he just had kind of a different approach to the game.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Another great one I saw — this meme was, it was Tiger Woods as someone who just came out of culinary school, and John Daly was a guy who worked his way up from, like, being a dishwasher.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s pretty good, I like that. We could talk about the IRA. Was that not today or yesterday? When was that signed? I just saw some stuff about that.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, that was today.
Asa Kamer: That was today. Hey, guys, celebrate these moments. They don’t come that often in climate tech.
Ross Kenyon: A very funny meme about the IRA today is like a conversation in a tweet between two people. One person said, “Did you hear that we passed the Free Ice Cream Bill?” The other person says, “No, that’s amazing. When do we get our free ice cream?” And he’s like, “Oh no, it has nothing to do with that. It just made having dogs illegal.” If the worst thing I can say about it is that the title is a little bit of an overstatement, then that’s fine, because that’s such a [unclear] criticism. I mean, I’ve heard that joke, you know, that kind of thing too, and it’s like, all right, if there’s no actual substance to it, that’s a problem, but whatever, you know — you can score those points, who cares.
Asa Kamer: Yeah, plus one. I think it’s less a joke about the bill and more a joke about how DC works, though. [unclear] By the time it’s done, everyone’s got to throw their thing into it so it can all pass, and that’s just kind of the way that it goes. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a criticism of that in particular, just the way that laws get passed. Making dogs illegal is — that’s funny. I think they just wanted to choose, like, an absurd — it’s actually horrible. Yeah, pretty much.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: It’s exciting to see it happen, but then it is interesting to see the general public reaction. And I feel like, in general, I’m always curious about the way people react to climate news. We’ve talked about this a bit before, but there are people who kind of are always really happy — and I would argue a little Pollyannish — about it, and then people who always just find the negative. But rarely is it one or the other; usually any climate news that comes out has levels of nuance and has pros and cons to it. And I think a lot of people pointed — I think Jason Hochman laid it out — like, this isn’t the bill that climate advocates sat down and wrote, you know. That’s not what we ended up getting, but it’s the biggest step forward in our lifetimes, and it’s worth celebrating for that reason.
Ross Kenyon: It’s funny to see the disagreement about it, too, because the people I saw that didn’t like it were, like, right-wing, and they didn’t like it very much; and then the, like, super far-left people thought it didn’t go far enough and were pretty angry. So it seems like most of the middle just, like — seems great, seems good. Most of the climate people I know who work on this were pretty excited. I don’t know, that should tell you something.
Asa Kamer: I always get nervous when we’re spending an enormous amount of money, and I never know how much to care about debt. Like, no one does. Ross does. Because these numbers are also so big that you have no way of relating to, like, how much is too much and why. Once you’re, like, drilling into it, it’s like multiple years of GDP, and you’re like, it’s good for climate, why not just tack it on to the bill? I have no way of knowing, well, should this be stopped? Should spending — is there a point, or should we just be in debt forever? [unclear]
Ross Kenyon: That’s good for the deficit hawk on this call: how could it possibly be? They raised taxes more than they had in spending. Some people on the left would find that to be too moderate an approach, you know — they wanted to spend more. But Manchin kind of put the brakes on and didn’t want to; he wanted it to be deficit reducing. He’s like, also, we can spend a lot, but we also have to raise taxes on corporations. So it’s basically getting the tech industry and the finance industry to pay for more renewable energy.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, I think that brings it kind of — again, I guess I read the New York Times article, so if this is not a fun topic for you guys — [unclear] — but, you know, pointing to the fact that the $60 price per tonne of captured CO2, up from $35, and kind of the whole economics around, you know, now that solar and wind and renewable energy have become so affordable: do these measures around capturing emissions make sense financially, et cetera, et cetera?
And I kind of went back to that podcast with Julio Friedmann when he was talking about CCS. And I think I told you, Asa, like, I was never against CCS, but I was always, you know, skeptical. And I feel like listening to Julio in that podcast brought in a lot of new information and data points for me, and one of the most important being that a lot of CCS in the US is used in, like, industrial heating — so, like, creation of steel and whatnot — not necessarily what we think of it as, exclusively coal and natural gas power plants, right? That’s kind of, I think, the image we conjure to mind when we talk about CCS, but actually there are other sectors that are trickier or more expensive to decarbonize, and that’s where a lot of the CCS is happening. And clearly I need to learn more about this, but I just felt like — I don’t know, there’s a lot of nuance, and we should bring on some CCS experts to answer our questions.
Asa Kamer: The group of people who are, like, really well-informed about carbon removal and talk about it a lot — I feel like there’s a growing bias towards, like, high durability and high permanence, and a bias against, like, quote-unquote natural solutions. And I think there are pros and cons on both sides. That’s just really interesting, that there’s that sort of intellectual bias, and then in reality, where you actually see money from, like, the offset markets and even government spending going — even, like, corporate net-zero plans — it’s almost all towards, like, natural solutions that don’t meet those durability criteria set up by, like, various think tanks and nonprofits and corporates like, you know, Frontier and stuff. I don’t know, do you guys know what I’m talking about? I just find that interesting, that among certain thinkers it’s like durability, durability, durability, but then when you go out to, like, where’s the money actually flowing right now, it seems like very much towards forestry and agriculture solutions. And I wonder if the two aren’t related.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I think you bring up a good point, but I think that part of the reason academics that study this are really getting into durability and permanence is because they’re seeing a market that is flooded with arguably low-cost, oftentimes low-quality — although I’m certainly not saying, you know, reforestation, or that all nature-based solutions are low quality, because there are terrific high-quality projects on the market. But I think maybe that’s almost why there’s this kind of bias: because it’s kind of the pendulum counteracting the current market space. That’s just one theory, but I do think that they seem to kind of line up.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I could see that. I think historically you’re trying to overcome decades of just “plant a tree” and that sort of reasoning, or even still, recently, the trillion tree initiative that was popular for a while. So I can see there being a pretty strong swing against that. We’ve been thinking a lot about how to get the ton-year accounting right, and if and how to use a discount rate, and what this should actually look like, so you can make comparisons across carbon removals with different durability but also still have a commodity market at scale, as opposed to the writing out of less durable carbon removal.
And not — not only writing it out, right. Another way of saying this is essentially saying it’s not carbon removal. I feel like the exclusion here is saying that this is not carbon removal. I’ve seen some articles on this recently, too. I don’t know that that’s really that helpful, frankly. Also, if you only want to count the durable solutions, we’re never getting anywhere close to having a meaningful number. It’ll be a lot harder. If you don’t count — if you’re not trying to use that stuff, I don’t think we even get anywhere close.
Asa Kamer: Have you played that Road to Ten Gigatons game? I’m sure you have, because it’s Julio’s game.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, terrific game. Shoutout to Julio, as always, on the pod. We should just, like, play that live and talk about it — that would be a great thing to do. Ross, that’s what we need: play that live and talk about it. Because I feel like, although rooted in this idea of a kind of light-hearted game — the Road to Ten Gigatons, although it’s rooted kind of in this light-hearted, you know, gamification of information — I think it’s really illuminating. And as you’re playing it you understand, you know, the different land-use restrictions or energy restrictions on different methods, and it kind of advocates for the idea of a portfolio of carbon removal. And so I really certainly [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: We talk a lot about trying to be very agnostic, and I think as a team we are pretty agnostic, in that we do think all additional removals are worth pursuing to certain degrees, right? But again, I would think — I often — I’m not against nature preservation at all. I think we need to pay for nature preservation, but I see a huge problem in, like, the fact that 95% of credits are avoidance, for example. And so I might put myself [unclear] maybe like the academics who are on the durability scale. I look at the avoidance credits and say, oh, there’s a problem in the market, so I’m constantly advocating for removals as opposed to avoidance. And maybe there’s a similar dynamic where there are kind of carbon lovers like, oh wow, the market has so many nature-based solutions, we need to advocate more. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit, I don’t know.
Asa Kamer: Yeah, I don’t — I don’t know either. One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot, though — I’ve been thinking about this for years — is, I don’t know that, like, 50 years or 100 years from now — and I don’t even think even that close — I don’t think permanence really matters that much, assuming that you think the cost curve is going to keep getting cheaper and cheaper to store. And those decades will see amazing technological growth. They have to, or we’re in big trouble. So isn’t removing carbon for that duration of time more valuable, because of the discount rate — like, those tonnes for the next 30, 40, 50 years — more valuable than hundreds or thousands of years?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: [unclear] Yeah, the immediacy — the immediacy of a lot of nature-based solutions. But I actually think we don’t really say “nature-based solutions” anymore. I think that’s kind of becoming passé, with this whole idea that there’s tech in nature, and hybrid. I think now people are more just thinking of it in terms of, well, they all have some level of technique involvement and human involvement, and so we should just maybe call them all removals. And then, yeah, ton-year accounting matters, and we need to figure out how to balance, you know, shorter-term removals with longer-term removals, et cetera. I don’t — do you guys think, though, that that’s becoming passé, to say, like, nature versus tech? People say no, it’s all hybrids.
Asa Kamer: Yeah, some sort of amalgamation. I mean, [unclear] was saying something about this recently, about how you’re not really using that terminology anymore. I feel like the phrase “nature-based solutions” is, like, a bit of a cope. It’s a bit of, like, makes you feel good, you know what I mean? Like, I feel like there are a lot of environmental groups or activists you see against carbon removal, and maybe even against offset markets, and certainly against, like, you know, technological carbon removal. But then it just sounds warm and fuzzy to be like, it’s a nature-based solution to climate change. Like, what could be wrong with that — we’ll plant trees and we’ll rehab the ecosystems and we’ll all go back to organic agriculture and it’ll be so wonderful. And it’s just not that easy and not that simple.
And I feel like — I don’t know, I guess it rubs me the wrong way when I see people selling the concept of a nature-based solution as if it’s that simple, when, like, you’re saying, Siobhan, there’s a ton of technology and intervention that’s required to get the benefits that you can from different agricultural practices, like forestry practices, that can deliver carbon removal and can deliver a lot of other benefits. But it’s not just, like, we do nothing and nature just wins and takes back over, you know. It’s hard stuff, and it requires chemistry to, like, do the soil sampling, and there’s all these different — you know, it just requires technology too. I guess that’s my rant about it. It’s just marketing language, then, for you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I think the tendency to push back against this discount rate thinking — yeah, it’s been going around for a long time. I’ve been mulling this one over, too, not for a long time. I think even if there was a good faith — I think that argument is true, given certain assumptions about technological development. I think a tonne removed for 50 years is worth more in some ways than one removed for longer. I would rather have more of those tonnes removed for a shorter time than one tonne for longer. But even saying that, I know people will use that same logic to fund spurious avoidance and offset projects. So if your objection is practical rather than more ideological, then I’m sympathetic to that, because I certainly think my logic will be used by people less scrupulous. I don’t even know how much of it — do you think that even is impacting how people are thinking about this? Am I onto something with that, or?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: No, I think you’re definitely right. No, I think you bring up a good point, that so much of carbon removal, how we think about it and how we deploy it, has to be from a place of academic rigor. And whether that academic rigor is natural reforestation as opposed to monocropping, or different, you know, these different things, whatever it is — I think it has to come from a place of, like, the best scientific rigor we can bring to the table. Well, and I think you’re right that there are some less scrupulous actors that will take advantage of that. But I don’t think you’re wrong, Ross. I think you’re dead on.
Asa Kamer: Yeah, I saw the criticism of NCX for this, where it’s like, if you’re doing this ton-year accounting, like, cool, you delay the tree from being harvested for a single year. It’s like, that’s an avoided emission for a year. Cool. Could you go all the way down? People are objecting. I feel like [unclear] if I say this, because we’re also interested in kind of their stuff, and so I want to talk with NCX. So maybe my even saying this will have their ears burning, so they’ll come — they’ll come hang. NCX, I’m looking at you. Come on.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, I mean, that was one of the criticisms, right — they’re saying, like, okay, so you’ve taken this ton-year thing to an additional order of magnitude less. Rather than 10 years of permanence, we’re talking about one year multiplied many times. Like, how valuable is that?
Ross Kenyon: I’m sure we’ll see some that are even less rigorous, even less legit. What I’m trying to say is, no dig at NCX here. I’m sure you’ll see [unclear] coming.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Well, Newsroom did do a ton-year accounting episode — for some reason I feel like they did. We did — like, I heard it with [unclear] and [unclear], who I think are both at UC Berkeley. I’ll just give a little confirmation. But yeah, I think that episode — I really liked the episode, and I think there is enough fodder content there that it might be worth doing something, a follow-up thing, whether it’s on CRN and Radhika kicks *ss and does it, or whether we do it here in kind of a little more of a casual style or something. I feel like I’m curious about it, I know other people are curious about it too, and that was a great episode. But it was definitely one of those episodes that I was, like, having to kind of rewind and re-listen, because it was dense, it was heavy. There was a lot I was trying to absorb.
Asa Kamer: It was high on the geek scale, for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Man, I appreciate [unclear]. But, you know, that probably means I want more. I want to know, I want more — that wasn’t enough, you know? What if we get Radhika on here and she can kind of give it to us in more layman’s terms?
In a perfect world — we have recently hired [unclear], who is our methodology analyst, and he’s been crunching these numbers and working quite hard on figuring out how to make this work. I would love to ask him questions, but I’m genuinely curious about — you need graphs, basically. I feel like you really need to see the curves, and how they look, and how it changes based upon how many certificates are issued for how many years, and how this affects it. And it isn’t just scientific logic either; there’s also business logic about the supplier side, also about — some of them say that their lithospheric carbon is good for thousands of years. So do you give them actually thousands of years of credit? Well, we’ll be long dead, I assume, unless something magical happens. Are there many other services that we pay someone to do something a thousand years from now? There aren’t that many. I can’t [unclear]. Is there a single one?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I think this is bringing up some interesting — it’s an interesting discussion topic, so it’d be worth digging into more, and, like, on the surface, because I understand this is a topic that you could spend a dissertation on, you know. It’s a really dense topic. But it’d be fun if we could somehow bring it to a level that an audience could get the gist of it without having to rewind multiple times, as I was doing. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.
Asa Kamer: Thanks, everyone. Bye.
Ross Kenyon: All right, goodbye. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that would be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
